Gregory Rodriguez: All Related Content

The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!

Remember what your elementary school teacher taught you about the War of Independence? The British wore scarlet coats, which made them easy marks and symbolized institutional pomposity, adherence to status over efficiency and an out-of-touch empire bent on doing things the old way. The rebellious American colonists, on the other hand, wore whatever; they were nimble, unencumbered by institutional baggage and not too proud to employ guerrilla tactics.

My German 3 summer school instructor at Berkeley once pulled me aside after class to accuse me of having a deep-seated hatred toward all things German. Irritated, I told her, “Yeah, that’s why I’m spending my summer learning your damn language.”

More than 20 years later, my German-language skills are just as lacking as before, but my relationship to the Fatherland is as complicated as ever. I don’t hate Germany. But, apart from being fond of Berlin (whose openly gay mayor calls it “poor but sexy”), I don’t exactly love Germany either.

“Paradoxically it is the multiplicity of channels ... that has led many to seek refuge in narrow niches,” argues Gregory Rodriguez, head of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He warns that the problem with “hyperconnectivity” ...

For nearly half a century, the term "inner city" has been code for poor and minority. But now white flight — the decades-long trend of affluent Anglos leaving the urban core for leafier suburban cul-de-sacs — has run its course. And "inner city" is about to take on a whole new meaning.

Kim Kardashian's butt is real. Some haters said it was fake. To prove them wrong, she had a doctor take X-rays to show that it was implant-free.

Odd as it sounds, when a symbol of trumped-up celebrity has a part of her anatomy authenticated, it's a perfect expression of Americanness. So, on this Fourth of July, I'm adding Kim Kardashian's butt to the list of the things I celebrate.

Similar sentiments were expressed after Huntington's comments in the Los Angeles Times by Gregory Rodriguez: A nation needs an enemy – if we don't have one we have to invent it. Rodriguez argues that from time immemorial collections of people have ...

God bless the American media. Over the last two weeks, thousands of well-educated journalists and political experts have made their mortgage payments by commenting on the antics of an idiot congressman who tweeted a picture of his genitals, and an idiot ex-governor who sloppily manipulated history for ideological ends.

I get the obsession on the first story. Sex always sells. Illicit sex — or something close to it — by arrogant politicians sells more. That's a constant.

Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez seconded that notion recently in "For Americans, to infinity and beyond," in which he called for America to think big again with an expanded space program. And, of course, it's not just the United States and Russia ...

Gregory Rodriguez wrote on this point in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. These stories hold our attention not because - just because they involve powerful men brought down to size, always an American favorite, but because they remind us of the often ...

Woohoo! Secularism has arrived. That was one reaction to the news that Pitzer College in Claremont is launching a secular studies department.

"Well, it's about time!" wrote an eager academic in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The editor of CNN's Belief blog didn't know "whether to be surprised that it happened or surprised that it took so long."

When I got to ground zero at 10 minutes past midnight Sunday night, a few hundred people, mostly   young men, were hooting and hollering in the direction of two kids waving a 3' x 4' American flag with a black-and-white image of Marilyn Monroe emblazoned on it.  Scores of people were thrusting their camera phones in the air taking pictures of the swirling crowd, and complete strangers were shooting one another friendly glances.

The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 — with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids — was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy.